There was no blood on the moon
tonight. The moon was a sun. The total lunar eclipse, April 15th,
2014, was a magical thing. A long performance, that made me aware of just how
big this earth is. We have a very long
shadow. How glorious, what a universe to
behold. Yet we forget how small the universe
really is, with all its’ possible multiple dimensions, or its’ so called
worm-holes, or mysteries, and imaginings.
We’ve zoomed so far back in time
trying to find out how it all began, made our projection of the totality of
things so huge, so immensely beyond our mortal comprehension, that we’ve
forgotten where we are, the only place there is in fact, for a human being to
be. Right here. Right now. Where else is there? Sure we’ve launched ourselves into space, but
we were earthlings in space. It wasn’t
exactly outer space, nowhere even close to the edge of the sun’s orbit. We haven’t left the neighborhood. We are in orbit down here, and we are in orbit
out there. A few dozen earthlings went
to space. How nice. Nothing like a little field trip to fuel the imagination
and take us a little further out, into our science fiction adventure in
forgetting our nature.
What does it mean for earthlings to
launch themselves off their life support system, their source of life, their
home? Can there be any rational
explanation for it, or does it lead a clear thinking person to believe that these
astronauts and their admirers, these imaginatively deluded, self-identified space
colonizers, have forgotten that they are
the earth?
We are not separate from this
planet, well, at least not according to evolutionary theory. Here we are, billions of years in the making,
uniquely suited to life on this planet, in this solar system, breathing this
air, in this peculiar and unique atmosphere.
Really, where do we think we’re going?
We can watch a performance like the
moon, in the shadow of our home, getting comfortable in the darkness, turning
off all the lights. Even when our earth
shadow turns off the lights on the moon, which turns our big night-light in the
sky way down, one could still have a snack, in the faint glow of the golden orb
in the night sky. Tonight it was like
the sun, about to set on the horizon, all soft orange and glowing, and it’s the
moon, doing it’s same old thing, but longer, endlessly held there in a faint
glow of perfect roundness, in our shadow.
On and on, held in our view, moving slowly nowhere. Where did we lose track of our place in the
solar system, passengers on this orbiting planet, full of blood, wet with the
tides of the moon?
They call it a blood moon, but we
are the bloody ones. We are the one’s
naming things, giving meaning to things, making up explanations for the
universe, creating alternative universes with our imaginations, in concert with
our inventions. Telescopes: to take us
further away from here and now, showing us images of a past we’ve convinced
ourselves is comprehensible to us. But
we are always here, now, whether we are seeing backwards or projecting
forwards, we can only ever do it from here, inside our minds. We think we are the inventors, but we are
inventions of the earth, conscious creators, in a little holding pattern of
mental projection. Someday if we return
to sanity, we might even call it what it is, a type of collective
psychosis. But it’s an interesting
adventure anyhow, in the light of the moon, halfway out of the shadow of our
mother planet, reflecting brightly the light of our energetic seed, sunlight,
as we orbit just so. We think we are
going somewhere, but we’ll always be now here, which means we are going
nowhere.
Where else is there?
